Every day, somewhere, someone is complaining of being cancelled and the supposedly ubiquitous threat of a malign, omnipotent force that is being presented as an elemental threat to all of us: namely 'cancel culture'. It is nearly impossible to avoid various prominent figures opining from influential platforms about how they have been 'cancelled'. Some of these occasions are deeply controversial and about genuine wrongs – attempts at policing and controlling public debate. Others are no more than storms in a tea cup.
But some of the occasions that attract media attention are high-octane cases which involve ideological claim and counter-claim, and the charge from right-wingers that 'the woke' are apparently the greatest threat to Western civilisation ever seen – said with a straight face despite the seriousness of the climate crisis.
Examples of people citing cancel culture are easy to find. In the last couple of days, writer Anthony Horowitz commented in the
Daily Telegraph: 'These days, the nervousness, the cancel culture, the fear of offending, of causing a Twitter storm, or the sudden laser-like focus that some writers attract – J K Rowling is the obvious example – strikes me as worrying and saddening'.
Cancel culture clearly touches on a number of raw nerves. It is also helped by being a memorable phrase. Across Western societies, numerous fault-lines have appeared regarding how we collectively talk and listen, and the words and language we use. Right-wingers like to invoke an illiberal, identity politics as 'woke', but are less inclined to self-reflect on an increasingly intolerant, anti-democratic strand of the right, prepared to run roughshod over due process and the rule of law in the UK, US, Hungary and elsewhere.
Yet, while this phrase is bandied about, there is another cancel culture which gets sparce attention and yet defines much of our politics, public debate and government. It is so pervasive that it goes mostly unstated. It is that the future, our collective future on this planet, has been postponed – or more accurately – the potential of humanity to create alternative futures to the present is seriously on the skids.
Cancelling of the future
The late Mark Fisher, whose
Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures has just been published in a new revised edition by Zero Books, talked of what he described as 'the slow cancellation of the future' in recent times; by which he meant the disappearance of the prospect of a different future: politically, economically and socially.
Fisher drew from such concepts as 'hauntology' to create the idea of 'lost futures'. These describe the long legacy of once powerful ideas which shaped Western societies, but which are now little more than echoes and cliché. Jacques Derrida's original idea of hauntology was primarily about Marxism; in Fisher's analysis, it is about a much wider interpretation of Western culture and politics.
Fisher's work had much in common with writer Simon Reynolds (who writes a pithy afterword to the current collection); who has interrogated the evolution of pop music culture and the growing grip of nostalgia, most notably in his book
Retromania. Nostalgia defines the content of not just popular music, but the wider terrain of arts, culture and creativity. Increasingly, there is an audible yearning for past glories and a belief in previous golden eras of expression and inventiveness: the 1960s obviously, but now the 1970s and even 1980s.
With this tangible sense of looking backward comes a profound sense of less, and feeling lesser in the present. Why do Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan and the Stones still matter so much? Fantastic and joyful as they were, could it not be that there is a little too much investment in the Beatles' story to the point of near-canonisation? As Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker pointed out, continually reliving the 1960s makes us in the here and now 'children of the echo', constantly living in the shadow of that decade's 'Big Bang' and plagiarising it to ever-diminishing returns: Britpop anyone?
A powerful undertow to this is the changing contours of social class in post-war Britain; the increasing opportunities for working-class people in the 1950s and 1960s in employment, life choices and chances, and in the world of arts and entertainment. This was a time of new openings in TV, drama, music and the arts, and of overthrowing the old stuffy, constraining attitudes of Victorian Britain which still seemed to have power until the early 1960s.
The long tail of this era of British creativity could be witnessed continuing as a counter-story to Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s, but slowly as social mobility collapsed, benefits were taken away from those in poverty and younger people and the forces of privilege reasserted their entitlement culture. Alongside the rising power of nostalgia, popular culture became less a sense of liberation and of challenging authority, and more about playing it safe.
The band Coldplay are not the sole culprits here, but they and a host of anodyne privately-educated and privileged white men became the new mainstream norm, playing music to dull your senses. Natalie Olah in
Steal as Much as You Can calls this 'the toffification' of culture: the exclusion of working-class, different and challenging voices by the tyranny of privileged voices. This is a real cancel culture if we could only recognise it.
There is a connection between this cultural shift and the economic and political. The cancellation of the future is a product of the epic political, economic and social changes we have witnessed in recent decades. The emergence and dominance of an unrepentant, turbo-charged aggressive capitalism; huge shifts in income and wealth; tech-authoritarianism; the rise of a billionaire class, and the fawning and idolisation of them by an entire class of hangers-on and in wider culture now seems unstoppable.
Cancel culture, globalisation and the future
Some may think Fisher over-exaggerates his thesis, talking melodramatically about how the future has been taken from us, but other perspectives and research back-up his perspective.
In 2004, Australian writer Richard Eckersley suggested that the only version of tomorrow on offer is a bigger version of today. He posited that this effectively said to Western populations: 'don't worry, the future has already been decided by people with more power and influence than you. They know what is best for you and the planet'. This was, in effect, a deterministic globalisation saying 'there is no alternative', and that people who were ultimately powerless had no option but to accept it.
From this, Eckersley drew on detailed research he had undertaken with Australian young people on globalisation. He made the connection that being told your future had been decided for you and all the big choices made was not empowering. His findings showed that this official version of the world had a relationship with negative self-esteem of many young people who felt there was little that they could do to make a positive difference.
In today's bleaker climate, part of Eckersley's thesis seems a little too Panglossian in one respect: promising a bigger version of today which he described as 'linear optimism'. We do not even have that narrow offering in the present. But his wider argument stands even more and chimes with Fisher.
The cancelling of a different future(s) and our believe that we can create it fills all of Western societies. Disappointment, anger and loss characterises so much of our politics, government and culture. No-one really thinks Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and many others have anything original to say or are up for the challenges we face, but where are our feasible alternatives at a world-system level?
The cancel culture of globalisation has profoundly affected all of us in a way that the many armchair warriors, and entitled anti-wokers like Laurence Fox and Neil Oliver, concerned with micro-cancel culture wars, barely notice. What prize talking about the silencing and marginalising of our capacity to think of alternative futures and a world better than the present, when you can just close someone down and deny them legitimacy? You can call them woke and say they are slaves beholden to the cult of identity politics; or you can endlessly talk about statues, symbols and signs, defending or damning the legacy of Empire.
One superficial but still important point concerns the issue of framing and the impact it can have in shaping and distorting public debate. Cancel culture is a brilliant, evocative and memorable phrase. It invites identification with those claiming they have been cancelled, and makes a wider constituency think they have been wronged and an injustice has occurred.
It is not an accident that in the present climate it is the ideologically-charged right-wing who have come up with some of the most telling descriptions: alongside cancel culture sit such terms as 'culture wars' and 'virtue signalling'. One reason for this is the number of right-wing media platforms – the
Daily Mail,
Daily Telegraph,
The Spectator,
Spiked and GB News – alongside a range of committed foot-soldiers and proselytisers.
Yet that is only part of the story. On one level is the power of framing which the right operate successfully, and which the left and liberal sentiment manifestly fail to do. Who outside of left-wing circles and academia talks of neo-liberalism as the governing outlook of the world economic and social system? The answer is next to no-one.
Describing your age and time, names and frames, so people wishing to challenge the existing order have to come up with pithier, populist descriptions than talking about something as esoteric as neo-liberalism. But there is much more going on than the names we give to things. We have been, and are, living through times of epic transformation: of capitalism, technology, what it is to be human, and the climate crisis.
The forces of the right have been in the ascendant globally the past four decades, not just in the West, but China and much of the developing world. Their version of the world once had at least that pretence of a better future: a bigger version of today. And that has now been blown apart, at least in the West, and is facing new challenges and pressures.
The attempt to launch a cancel culture thesis is in part a diversion from the legacy of the right's abject failure particularly on the economic dimension. But it is also an uncomfortable realisation that the old cultures of authority, deference and control have steadily diminished, and need new forms of social control and manipulation. These latter forces will aim to not only delegitimise new voices but to stop us thinking and being creative about big questions – such as imagining a different future.
To dare to dream, conceive and build different futures is fundamental and central to being human. We cannot let the real cancel culture steal our future.
